I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Baht'at Bardic Postmortem Baht'at Bardic has come and gone, and as per usual, it's worth examining what went well and what went ... less well. We ended up feeding almost exactly thirty people, including three kids. I've said before that thirty (well, 32 to be exact) is pretty much my favourite number of people to cook for. It's enough that you have some wiggle room and can experiment, but it's not so many that you have to really simplify things in order to get the food out. For example, for thirty, I'm willing to consider serving something fried; for 150, I am not. At 150, the labour, space, and time costs to fry things is just too high. At thirty, you've got enough budget to have a bit of a play with recipes, though, which is nice. Also, crucially, if you don't go crazy, you can do thirty people by yourself if you have to, although having at least one other person makes it a lot more fun and a lot less stressful. I was fortunate to have Aðísla Arnulfsdóttir with me in the kitchen all weekend. A few other people popped in to help out now and again, including Milada von Schnecken and Juliana ferch Luned, with Maredudd ap Gwylim helping out with the dishes. with such people involved the kitchen was a very happy place. The menu had been pretty well fixed for a while. If you have a glance, you'll see that several places simply mention, 'sauces.' Since we were doing a buffet style feast, I decided to serve six sauces, all on the side. While, on the one hand, it hurt me to send out the main proteins (chicken, lamb, and fish) with no sauces and little seasoning, it meant that people with allergies or strong preferences could choose which sauce they wanted, or forgo it entirely. Several people made a point of mentioning what a great idea they thought this was. Sadly, this is a method of service which doesn't scale well, or rather, which doesn't scale well for a served feast. Here I could set out six bowls of sauce. For a feast of eight tables, that would mean 48 cups of sauce. (I also had salt, poudre fort, and poudre douce available on the buffet for all the meals.) Moving through time, now ... Thursday, I did the pre-cooking, and then Friday drove up to the site, picking up Aðísla and the rest of the groceries on the way. The target of opportunity shopping meant that I had extra parsnips, extra cream, and a box of mushrooms that were going out of date that were so cheap I couldn't resist. Our kitchen spice stock also had a partial bag of lentils. Which meant that Friday night, we added a lentil dish to the menu - onions and a few other things. It was Aðísla's dish from start to finish. The dishes were well-received, although we did have some of each leftover, which was only to be expected. Breakfasts were mostly on me, since I'm awake early by habit, preference, and (when at home) via feline intervention. I slept in until 0530 or so on Saturday morning, then started making malaches and scones. Since breakfast was on from 0700 - 0900, we made the sawgeat and votte lombarde in small batches as people trickled in. All pretty much by the numbers. As noted above, for such small numbers, we could cook the egg dishes that way. At this point we sat down and finalised our plans for what was to be cooked where and when. We also added two dishes to the menu. Since we had so many parsnips, I decided to do a simple gratin with another bunch of them. (Parsnips, cream, salt, pepper, baked with seasoned breadcrumbs.) We also opted to do stuffed mushrooms, using bread crumbs, the mushroom stems, and some other bits and bobs. We started our prep and got ready for a 1300 service. Everything went to plan, and we didn't need to use the second oven, since we had two racks in the main oven, and could stagger things appropriately. On schedule, we rolled the first course dishes out. Then we finished the second course dishes and rolled them out as well. Everything from both courses was on the table by 1330. All the chicken was eaten, and in hindsight, I should have laid on a bit more. I had, I believe, a 2.5 kg package which is a pretty common size, but 3 kg would have been better - 100 gm/person rather than about 80 gm. Not that anyone went hungry, of course. The lamb was about the same amount and there was only a bit of that left. There was more fish left, but fish is often a hard sell at these events. As I say, no one went hungry but we didn't have a lot of leftovers which is nice. The gratin was all eaten, as were the mushrooms. There was a little pasta leftover, and some peas. For the evening, we followed the menu pretty closely, but since we had time, we also whipped up some fritters with the leftover lentils and fava beans from Friday night. (Add flour and salt until it's fritter dough-y, then fry.) The lentil fritters were a big hit! One person specifically asked if I would cook lentil fritters for breakfast Sunday, and if I couldn't, could I teach his dad how to do it. We had leftover sweet egg yolk filling, so we made some extra tarts with that on them. That evening we chucked out the remaining peas and fava beans, although there wasn't a huge amount of either. Sunday morning was more scones, more sawgeat, leftover malaches, and, yes, lentil fritters. I fried off some of the leftover cabbage from Friday, too. It did start to feel a bit like a non-traditional fry-up, to be honest. We also set out more of the fruits and nuts from the night before, and the cheese that hadn't gone in the pasta. Then we packed up, cleaned down, and headed out. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. The 'sauce bar' is a good idea for a buffet-style event, even if I get twitchy about serving naked fish. (So to speak.) I should have done a bit more chicken, and maybe a bit less fish and/or lamb. The timings were good. We could have done a bit more with the breakfasts, but I really wanted to get away from just doing modern breakfasts, which is pretty common. The medieval conception of breakfast is very different than the modern one, and this seemed like a decent compromise. And we came in well under-budget which is nice.